Establishing a well-rounded social media presence is important for many organizations, corporate entities and private individuals. Social media pages belonging to private individuals generally provide an online description of a page owner's socio-cultural profile including a page owner's friends, family, hometown, birthday, relationship status, political views, fans, interests, hobbies, likes, dislikes, and many more such attributes. Social media pages further provide a page owner's socio-economic status, educational background, professional qualifications and expertise, various networks, ventures and organizations a page owner is affiliated with, career opportunities a page owner is involved in, and several others. Social media pages belonging to organizations and corporate entities provide information relating to their businesses, business ethics, human rights, diversity in their workplace, sustainability considerations undertaken, charities supported, donations, endorsements, upcoming events, and various other parameters that impact society. In recent times, social media pages belonging to individuals, political parties, and non-profit institutions disseminate mass information about social and political uprisings and wrongdoings in restrictive and undemocratic territories and countries.
Social media pages of private individuals, organizations and corporate entities are typically hosted by social media systems, also referred to as social media networks. Common examples of social media systems include YOUTUBE™, FACEBOOK™, TWITTER™, LINKEDIN™, MYSPACE™, GOOGLE BUZZ™, and many more. Further, examples of social media systems include social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us™, and social news sites like DIGG™ and REDDIT™. Social media pages generally comprise web pages hosted by a social media system and can be accessed via computers, smart phones or any other Internet-enabled computing device.
Users of social media systems typically own one or more social media pages that are used as a platform to interact, exchange and engage with other owners or users and even, in some cases with individuals who do not own social media pages. Social media pages are personal or group pages that disseminate information through messages, files, posts, news feeds, photographs, audio clips, video clips, URL's, etc. Information shared on social media pages often involves associations through personal and business contacts, for example, friends, family, classmates, co-workers, customers, political constituents, clients, and various social groups/organizations on a social media system. In many scenarios, social media pages create associations by facilitating the acquisition of new contacts and networks.
As a result of such associations involving personal and business relationships, it is well known in the art that many individuals, organizations, groups, corporate entities and communities are empowered with potential marketing tools, relating to their products or services. Consequently, a large number of marketing campaigns are launched via social media pages, different from conventional marketing campaigns involving radio, television, print, and traditional online ads that are not dependent on social media systems.
In advertising and marketing campaigns launched via social media pages, advertisers and marketers post messages or advertisements on social media pages belonging to an individual, an organization, corporate entity, or in some scenarios, on a social media page that is owned by a common interest group or channel. Often, the social media page is owned by the marketer itself. Individuals review such messages or advertisements, generally termed “posts”, along with accompanying files, news feeds, photographs, audio clips, video clips, coupons, polls, quizzes, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) etc. It will be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art that use of such a wide variety of multimedia tools and features promotes rich, interactive and personalized social media experiences and manifests by driving users and web traffic to a social media page belonging to a social media page owner.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned benefits, it will also be understood that such a diverse set of multimedia tools and features (involving various files, posts, news feeds, photographs, audio clips, video clips, coupons, polls, quizzes, etc.) to publish content in social media pages, in combination with a wide array of social media systems (for example, FACEBOOK™, TWITTER™, LINKEDIN™, to name a few), creates an overwhelming multitude of options for social media page owners. To complicate matters, social media systems have disparate demographic and psychographic characteristics, and differ on rules, policies and standards on accessing published content. Consequently, when publishing new content on top of content that has already been published, performance evaluation (e.g., how well certain content resonates with viewers, users, or members of a given social media page) of published content on a social media page is crucial in understanding impact of such content. Such an evaluation saves time and valuable resources to individuals and/or organizations enabling them to publish quality content on social media pages, targeted at achieving an impact on users who review such pages. An ideal evaluation should not consume too much time, and should be able to be performed easily by individuals with minimal technical skills, and further can be repeated more than once, as necessary. Clearly, outcomes or results of an evaluation should comprise meaningful qualitative as well as quantitative performance measures that will depend on engagements and interactions of users with respect to a social media page. Since engagements and interactions are key to analyze the impact of social media pages, these measures can be used to determine various statistics that will determine the effectiveness of published content on social media pages. Examples of such engagements and interactions might include fan comments or “likes,” total number of fans of a given page, “re-tweets,” user-forwarded invitations to join a particular page, and other such measures.
Furthermore, an evaluation mechanism should contain provisions for making changes to assumptions considered in an evaluation, based on preferences of an individual who wishes to evaluate the effectiveness of published content on a social media page. Additionally, the evaluation mechanism should also provide recommendations on best practices of publishing content on social media pages with the intention that this will generate increased interactions and engagements by users. Accordingly, based on the knowledge of various performance measures and recommendations of an evaluation, users and/or owners of social media pages can employ one or more strategies and actions as appropriate, with a goal of maximizing the impact of a social media page.